Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent
“Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered”
Learning through suffering is hardly new. It is a central feature of Homer’s Odyssey, for example. Many people at different times have been graduates of the proverbial school of hard knocks. Necessity is one mother of a teacher. Perhaps, too, this is one of the lessons of the current pandemic in the various forms of suffering that it occasions.
But what is it that is learned through suffering? What is the lesson? For the ancient Greeks, it was to know the order of the cosmos and our place within that order. For modernity, the lessons are more ambiguous, mostly because of the abstract individualism of our age in the forms of autonomy, isolation, and separation from one another, like so many cosmic orphans cast adrift in an empty and indifferent universe. At best, there is the ambiguous quest for meaning but as bound up in the modern sophistic of our solipsistic selves – the idea that the self is the only knowable or existent thing (OED). Perhaps, just perhaps, COVID-19 may serve to awaken us to our care and concern for others and not just our fears for ourselves. Perhaps, just perhaps, it may serve to awaken us to our lives in community and to the limitations of our technocratic world and its assumptions. We make the machines that make or unmake us, after all.
The lessons of Lent go beyond knowing the order of the cosmos and the ambiguities of our contemporary confusions, self-obsessions, and assertions. The Letter to the Hebrews spells out the lesson which Lent illustrates. The lesson is mindful obedience. The illustration is the life of Jesus Christ concentrated into the intensity of forty days. Mindful obedience means obedience to an authority, in this case God as the ultimate author, the root meaning of authority. Somehow suffering belongs to this relation to authority. Not an easy lesson for our contemporary culture where authorities in every sphere, it seems, betray trust often in blatant forms of hypocrisy and arrogance.
“Although he was a Son, he learned obedience through what he suffered, “ Hebrews (5.8) tells us in what is one of the lessons for Morning Prayer on Lent I (Year 2). “Although he was a Son” – this is who Jesus is, the Son of the Father. The Son is defined by his relation to the Father. He is the eternal Son of the everlasting Father – “there was not when he was not.” He is, therefore, always the Son of the father. His whole being is defined by his love of the Father’s will. Such is obedience. The obedience is not just doing what one is told, blindly and ignorantly. It means doing what he is in his love for the Father. A knowing and loving obedience is the nature of the eternally and only-begotten Son of the Father. As such, this obedience is not learned; it is simply who he is. It is not something acquired. He is what he is; he does what he is; his act is his being. A knowing and loving ‘obedience’ belongs to the act of his essential being.
